An Interview with Ted Pelton
This "interview" mash-up was constructed by Brian Lampkin.
Ted Pelton is the author of the novel Malcolm and Jack and other Famous American Criminals and the collection of short stories Endorsed by Jack Chapeau 2 an even greater extent. He is also the founder and executive director of Starcherone Books—a publisher of innovative fiction. Ted was also a classmate of mine at the University of Buffalo and co-conspirator in several literary and community experiments and projects. He is currently at work on a collection of Woodchuck Stories. Let’s call them parables.
The danger in all interviews for the interviewee is that all control is lost in the editing process. A writer can be taken completely out of context or elided to the point of incomprehension. This interview foregounds those concerns and is compiled from twenty-five years of conversations, letters, blogs, articles and e-mails.
Brian: Hi, Ted, do you have time to talk?
Ted: Oh, we are all such busy people! Who has time? But friends, let us not forget what brought us here. No need to write essays every time out of the box. But we should continue to talk about why we think innovative/avantgarde/experimental/heterodox fiction is what we all have said it is: a potential antidote to the stupidity of American hegemony in 2007! [ed: I’m sure he knows the year; perhaps he refers to the pre-Obama era.] to the mindlessness of a society that knows of many ways that it's going in the wrong direction but seems powerless to stop itself!! to the simplistic selves we're told we are by advertisers politicians law enforcement officers and many many others!!! an art form at a time when books are commodities and Bertelsmann Murdoch Time Warner etc. has nearly secured its victory over us and we're at the point of near-irrelevance!!!! -- It's important to keep talking. We are not against tradition. We are a version of the tradition that's being edited out.
Brian: Right on. So how does an independent publisher and experimental writer promote his work?
Ted: A funny thing happened to me this week. I was promoting my novel Malcolm & Jack during the month… (and so the smartest among you are now saying, oh, I see, this isn't a legitimate [interview] [ed: to say the least], this is just part of his marketing strategy ... but I'll just leave that thread alone ...), and have it linked on amazon.com with Jack Kerouac's new "Original Scroll" version of On the Road …. This has made my sales rise ever so slightly (and not nearly enough to pay for the cost of the promotion).
Anyway, my novel is called Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) and is centered around a conjectured meeting between Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac. It's a novel about history, underground characters during the beginnings of American empire, improvisational poetics & politics, etc.
Brian: Okay, we’ll talk specifically about your novel. I was going to get there, but now’s fine. I love its mix of imaginative re-creation with the hard science of research. Is there any conflict in your mind about altering and even misrepresenting history?
Ted: Endings are the toughest thing to do, as a writer, no doubt….
Brian: I’m sure that’s true, but can you answer the question?
Ted: I am interested in and sensitive to questions concerning the ethics of representation…questions…may well be raised about my own novel, Malcolm & Jack, particularly where I fashion artificial constructions of the subject positions of such figures as Malcolm X and Billie Holiday. In answering these concerns myself, I would underline the sense that narratives are always constructions, and any verisimilitude created by fiction is an effect of the art form, in no way a speaking for the absent subject: verisimilitude is not verity. At the same time, what fiction writers DO is represent. That is the essential form of the art: it is an art of lying, invention, artificial construction, mimicry, semblance. I think it is a limitation on the practice of the art to say that there is some aspect of discourse, experience, or history that one should refrain from representing, as a hard and fast rule. Of course, one should not go into the minefields of representation unadvised or without respect for the significances of histories of racism, oppression, violence and the like. We should also expect the representations of others from assumed and masqueraded subject positions will be problematic--that is the nature of experimental art. Fiction, by its very nature, is a practice which self-consciously presents itself as lies, thus leads us to reflect upon lying, both within deliberately designed aesthetic creations and upon the at-large practices of fictionalization at work in all walks of our lives. Fiction is that discourse that calls into question the truth-telling strategies of language even as it employs them. Airtight, airbrushed, sanitized lies are the ones we really have to worry about. I am a fiction writer, and so I lie, but my lies haven't been killing people. This distinguishes Kent Johnson and I and y’all (who’s out there?) from Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney, who lie and kill people, or who lie and make people killers. Fiction is lies that do not lie about lying. That distinguishes the art of lies that is fiction from the lies of power we are so much in the grip of in our national discourse today. We are distrusted and feared by the world and we have alienated our own youth so much that a majority have opted out of democratic agency even as we claim to be bringing this great gift to the rest of the world.
Brian: You know, I don’t really think of Malcolm and Jack as an explicitly political novel, but to hear you talk…
Ted: Reading is becoming more and more explicitly a political act, and promoting reading certainly is. When I was writing this book, many people said to me, “Ooh, you’re going to get into trouble for writing as Malcolm X. People are really going to be angry with you.”
Brian: Oh, sorry, that was me. We’ve talked in the past about issues of beauty and ugliness. How has the impulse to make something beautiful informed your work?
Ted: How this impulse informed Malcolm & Jack? I wanted it to be a good book, so I kept trying to make it more beautiful in fulfilling the tasks it had created for itself. Billie Holiday not being able to sing because she’s in jail for drugs she takes because she’s miserable about her life and, goddamn it, oppressed in white America, allowed to appear on a marquee at a hotel club but having to enter the hotel through the back door, and then finding herself in an interracial affair in the segregated jail ... I wanted to create such complex situations out of little-appreciated histories in a way that fit my sense of the complexities of lived experiences–beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That’s all I know, as the poet sez, and I’m sorry some find that a maudlin or politically unsophisticated construction. I want to move thoughtful and sophisticated readers; part of that is political, certainly, but, as Williams says, bad writing never helped anyone. Beauty is what makes a political art successful or not. What is beauty? You tell me.
Brian: Hey, I’m interviewing you, remember? Which reminds me, is marijuana still part of your writing practice?
Ted: Anyway, there was another aspect to your question, about remaking the past. I think this was basically just a side-product of writing about my heroes, Malcolm X, Jack Kerouac, Billie Holiday, and, sure, Alfred Kinsey. And it was also certainly prompted by political resentments against a generation of politicians who have now pretty much passed from the scene, though not entirely–and certainly their assumptions haven’t. I was interested in taking on the 1940s, the period of the development of American Empire. I mean, yes, we fought a war that saved the world from fascism, not rhetorical but real fascism, and that was wonderful and necessary, but what has followed from that, the national valuing of war, has been disastrous, and keeps repeating.
I started the book following on the heels of the Reagan-Bush years; Reagan and Bush were both of that war generation. Malcolm and Jack were both part of an underground in the 1940s that became the different parts of the powerful counter-culture discourse of the 1960s. I wanted to meditate on the 1940s mythmaking that fueled the rise of conservatism in the late 20th century and trumped 1960s pacifist and socialist impulses. Remaking the past is something everybody does. It is the job of fiction writers, I think, to clarify this. Reagan isn’t in the book, but he so clearly exemplified this: I mean, in his stories, as was well documented (see Gary Wills’s book on him, for instance), he believed he actually fought in the war, even though he had worn the uniforms only in war films, and believed as well he was actually present at the liberation of the death camps, so powerful and convincing had his narrative reconstructions about these events been.
So in Malcolm & Jack we’ve got American Empire, hegemonic national narratives, historical crimes (as Malcolm never stopped telling us), and a bunch of sexy people at the heart of it–why shouldn’t I enjoy the activity of remaking the past? Susan Sontag says somewhere that the past is the greatest, most tantalizing imaginative space we have. It’s supposed to be stable. Of course, it isn’t at all; it’s all stories, being remixed and recreated all the time.
Brian: Lovely, Ted, really lovely and astute, I think. Hey, I remember you saying something about your opposition to the New York Times Best Novels of the Post-War era. It’s no good complaining if you can’t come up with alternatives.
Ted: Here's my top list:
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Ben Marcus – Notable American Women
Jane Smiley – A Thousand Acres
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
David Markson – Reader’s Block and/or This is Not a Novel
Joe Wenderoth – Letters to Wendy’s
Walter Abish – How German Is It
Stacey Levine – Frances Johnson
Charles Johnson – Oxherding Tale
Jeffrey DeShell – Peter (seriously; but then I'm the publisher, so maybe this is a cynical manipulation)
Denis Johnson – Jesus’s Son
Harold Jaffe – 15 Serial Killers
Thomas Pynchon – Vineland
Honorable Mentions:
David F. Wallace – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Matthew Derby – Super Flat Times
Raymond Federman – To Whom it May Concern
Brian Evenson – Altmann’s Tongue
Kevin Killian – Little Men
Elizabeth Sheffield – Gone
George Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and/or Pastoralia
Nina Shope – Hangings (sorry, compromised again)
Kenneth Bernard – From the District File
Robert Gluck – Margery Kempe
Carole Maso – Ava
Thersesa Hak Jyung Cha – Dictee
Thaddeus Rutkowski – Tetched
Sandra Cisneros – Woman Hollering Creek
Brian: It’s not my place to argue, but what about Malcolm and Jack?
Ted: I want to read more so I can do better. I know I'm forgetting some. But not nearly what the TIMES has forgotten. I couldn't believe that list was for real.
Brian: Well, thanks for your time, Ted. Anything else about Malcolm and Jack you want to get off your chest?
Ted: Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops!
I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.
Brian: Goodbye, Ted, it’s always good to check-in with an old friend. I remember when we first met in French class, what, twenty-five years ago….
Ted: Fuck, it's Friday afternoon & I'm home from work & no one has been writing… this concludes the project of reconstruction of a small island of happiness now long lost.
posted by Ted Pelton @ 12:01 PM
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